I would like to thank Martin Heitshu, a graphic artist from Montreal, Canada, for providing my new favicon, which, as you can see, is a lovely three-color Valknut (Knot of the Slain – a symbol of Odin). I am indebted to him for sprucing up A Heathen’s Day with some very merry colors just in time for Jól.

Yes, I know, a new blog. Unfortunately, the scale of the endeavor at mosmaiorum.org demands its own blog. There will likely be too much information

related directly to the Mos Maiorum site to accommodate here. Therefore a new blog, strictly informational, is now in place here http://mosmaiorumblog.blogspot.com.

I have chosen an attractive but simple template in contrast to the content-laded AHeathensDay.com. I hope you will find it accessible and fast opening. I so no need for a lot of bells and whistles.

On the Mos Maiorum Blog you will find

• Change logs listed site updates/corrections/changes
• News about Mos Maiorum Foundation (will also be posted to http://www.mosmaiorum.org/news.htm)
• Suggested Reading
• Recommended Websites
• And other related items of interest

I have also linked a Twitter account dedicated to Mos Maiorum:  @mosmaiorum

I will from time to time  reference Mos Maiorum here but for full support please visit the Mos Maiorum Blog and follow @mosmaiorum on Twitter or subscribe to the feeds there.

Thank you all for being supportive of this endeavor. I hope to continually improve and update Mos Maiorum in order to provide the broadest possible range of support to ethnic religion.

Lots of tweaking, as usual.

And the blog is back up after disappearing most of yesterday due to a php problem/incompatibility issue.

I’ve finished editing the drop-down menu and fixed a couple of errors I noticed in the Blogger version. I’ve also added “Share This” to each blog post. I don’t know how often my stuff gets shared but might as well make it easy for anyone who wants to share it. This is another thing that didn’t work well on Blogger but it set up perfectly on WP. If I wasn’t a convert before, I am now.

I’ve also begun SEO of A Heathen’s Day. I think this is something each Pagan should do with their blog and/or website. We need to get out there and mix it up. We need Heathen subjects to dominate on Google when a relevant term is typed in. ‘Nuff said.

I’ve added a tag cloud too – SEO again, since it uses HTML. It doesn’t look to be working at the moment – at least, it’s captured none of my previous posts. This update will be a test of it. If the categories used here don’t show up, I know I need to tinker or replace.

My next project is updating my blogroll. Here I just got it updated on Blogger. After that, I intend to add some ad-space. I’m not familiar with what works or doesn’t work best on WP so I’ll be looking at some different plugins. I want to offer some free ad-space to Pagan concerns. I’ve already promised one to Eternal Haunted Summer. I will also put an add up for Mos Maiorum. If I put in a box of four that will leave me a couple of extra.

I spent most of yesterday working on the Face-lift for Mos Maiorum; now that the blog is back up I can put some time in here as well to try to make things “just so.”

I’m here at last, on what a Blogger refugee might call “sacred ground.” The move has been initiated and will be propagating over the next few hours. Soon, everybody should see me in my new home – and see the slide-show that makes this theme so wonderful.

Blogger had become a nightmare for me. Not only did some bug keep the slide show from working, but the width of the post area diminished over the past week, crowding on the margins. It wasn’t like that at first, and I can’t identify the first moment i noticed it, but something was very wrong in the state of Blogger.

In short, I have felt like what was done to me by Blogger is what was done to Marsellus Wallace by those nitwit college-boy drug dealers in Pulp Fiction. I’m sure you remember the scene. I warn you, if you don’t like the language, don’t watch this clip:

So I’ve a-Vikinged over to a new land, away from oppression and towards freedom, like those first hearty Norwegians to sail to Iceland. I hope everybody likes it as much as I do, and I hope there are no problems or after-effects.

I want to thank UncaJoe of Progressive Nation (http://progressivenation.us/) for undertaking this salvage operation – you can see his moniker on my footer if you scroll down. Joe is a whiz at all things web-related and I highly recommend him for any such work. Another site Joe has done is House of Nina (http://houseofnina.com/) and if you want some good old fashioned in-your-face straight talk, visit HON. You’ll get an earful. Of course, I also recommend ProgressiveNation, which has published on article of mine (another is in the works but it ended up being a bit long; you know how it is…).

I’ve got some other changes in the works as well. Mos Maiorum is getting a complete overhaul. If you visit (www.mosmaiorum.org) you’ll notice right off the first of them – the missing (and quite ugly) GoDaddy ad-banner across the top. Now if they’d put Danica Patrick in a swimsuit on that damn thing I might not have minded, but as ads go, that was the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen.

Looking at the picture on the left, I think you smell what I’m cooking here. I may be a Heathen of questionable marketing accomplishments, but I think I know what looks good on an ad-banner.

And you might protest that this is a Heathen blog, but some men (and women) might argue persuasively that Danica Patrick is close to being a religious experience in and of herself, whether you like racing – or GoDaddy.

There is such a thing, after all, as liking something for itself. That, I would argue, is the case here.

Those of you who think I put this picture here for the car – well, I don’t even have anything to say to you. There’s no point. We’re talkin’ culture here, boys and girls.

Getting back to the changes on Mos Maiorum, you should see the rest of those soon. It takes a bit of time to convert all the articles to a new format. Most of the rest is done and ready to go. I hope you’ll get to see that soon.

So now I’ll be back to blogging like it should be done. Back to Heathenry like it should be done (in a perfect world that would include hauling Danica Patrick off over my shoulder and burning some churches on the way out of town, but we can’t have everything).

Some of you may have noticed the addition of some red to my new blog template. I’ve made the border beneath the post titles red, and the blockquote border is also red (so are the hyperlinks in the post text). This is falu red.

The reason for this is that red, in olden times, was the color used to color the runes. As Odin says in the Hávamál, “So do I write / and color the runes.” We know the color because in Guðrúnarkviða II, Gudrun says “In the cup were runes of every kind / Written and reddened, I could not read them”.

Some color was also retained on old rune stones, so we have more than literary evidence for their painting. In fact, the epigraphical evidence supports not just through any color remaining but the words themselves: A runestone in Södermanland says “Here shall these stones stand, reddened with runes”, and a second runestone in the same province says “Ásbjörn carved and Ulfr painted.”

So it seems fitting that some red should appear on what is, after all, a Heathen blog. I did not make the text itself red because of readability issues, but there were other ways to work some appropriate color in to the scheme.

I chose Falu red because it’s a lovely color and because it is apparently used in Scandinavia these days to colors runes. It’s a well-known color – Sweden is famous for its Falu red houses and barns. And it is perfect for my uses because it is neither too dark nor too light, but adds just the right amount of contrast to the page without taking attention from the content. In all cases, the color it replaced on this template was so faint as to be barely noticeable (including, I thought, the hyperlinks, which were originally a sort of rose).

I considered trying to work some runes into the background but so far haven’t decided on an approach I like that won’t disrupt the harmony of the design. I tried adding an image border to the post titles but could not make the css accommodate this (apparently there are some issues there with what css can and cannot do).

So this small change is my paean to the blood red runes. I hope you find it appealing.

These are its color coordinates:

Hex triplet #801818
RGBB (r, g, b) (128, 24, 24)
HSV (h, s, v) (0°, 81%, 50%)